The Noise of Thunder

The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, April 10-16, 2024

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see'
And I saw, and behold a white horse"
There's a man goin' 'round takin' names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down
When the man comes around

It’s Biblical thunderstorm season here in Tejas. One minute the sun is out; the next it’s raining so hard you cannot see out a windshield. And the weathermen are talking about tornados and softball-size hail. Which is somehow less disconcerting than when they say “It’s only quarter-size hail; nothing serious.”

We’ll be fine.

Perfecting Equilibrium Stories

Easter Eggs

My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Thursday April 18th - The PE Vlog: We’re starting a new series on building Large Language Models — AIs — for our own applications. Welcome to Virtual Grad Student! We’re going to set up a Large Language Model to run locally, feed it a clean set of data, then make it available to authors as a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re taking a look into installing and setting up the h2oGPT Large Language Model.

Friday April 19th - Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday April 21st — There will be no 2nd Civil War The US Civil War was the first great conflict of the Industrial Age, won in large part by the manufacturing might of the Union. Such wars have faded away along with the Industrial Age. Today’s conflicts are being fought with cheap homemade drones and cyberattacks and electronic trade. If there’s a Third Battle of Bull Run, only electrons will see it.